Sometimes one suffers for one's art

I arrived at the woods yesterday, glad I wore my ugly old lady boots, because it was a slushy, muddy mess. These woods are at a place called "Brown's Farm," which is an offshoot of a local nature preserve called Asbury Woods. If you go to Brown's Farm, you walk through a huge meadow, up a hill, and then there's a path through the woods. This path switchbacks down a huge bluff, so it can be steep and tricky even in dry weather. About a mile or so in, you reach Walnut Creek and the bridge. You can cross the bridge and keep going through more woods and wetlands, up yet another steep bluff, and go all the way over to Asbury Woods itself, which is about 3 miles or so.

I wasn't quite that ambitious yesterday, so I ventured to the bridge and then slightly beyond. I got some great shots of the creek and the snow-covered trees. It was beautifully sunny, but cold.

It's when I turned back and headed for home that the scary part started.





My burning desire for some color in the world around me has already been discussed here ad nauseum. I didn't see any new shoots coming up (let alone actual flowers), but there was this red bush in the meadow as I walked up. (Note: For all the edits to these pictures, I used some of the editing tools on the new Photoshop Express web-based application linked to the right. Try it out...super simple!) (Another Note: Not you, Lou. I don't think it's "do-it-yourself" enough for you, Ms. "I-shan't-use-a-template-yet-my-headers-will-still-be-fantastic"!)







Since I already have a lot of fuller landscape shots of this area, I decided to try to focus in on some of the other things that caught my eye, like the way the sun looked coming through the trees, shimmering on the leftover ice...
















...and this leaf being pulled along by the current...

















...and the way these trees seemed to reach out to the sun, straining for spring as much as I am....















...and the way the icicles still hang from the branchs on the banks, where the sun hasn't reached to melt them yet.











The normally placid creek was raging with spring runoff.











I made it to the bridge and rested on a rock there for a couple of minutes. It's a strenuous walk! And plus, I'm lazy.









I saw only 3 other people in the 2 hours or so I was in the woods: 2 women jogging together with a happy labrador retriever, and this man fishing. (Don't get me wrong...I don't mind being out in the cold, but I'm glad my hobby doesn't require me to stand in freezing water.)






Now, I don't have a picture of this last part, because I was afraid that if I took one I might in fact cause myself great injury.

As I turned toward home, I angled beside the normal path in order to stay closer to the water for a bit. I could see the path just fine, and also I was following several sets of footprints that had travelled the same way. Then, the path I was on forked away from the main trail. I had a moment of reason where I thought, "I should really double back and get on the main path." But like I said, the path I was on seemed to be well-travelled. It was now angling away from the water and in the same general direction as the main path. I thought.

As I continued to follow it, the footprints got more sparse. It seemed that at first as many as 10 different people and a couple of dogs had been there. Then there were perhaps five. And as I came to the big bluff that the main trail switchbacks down, there were only two. I stared up at the bluff, seeing the footprints that went up to a flatter area, and thought, "It would be really far to turn back to the regular trail; I'm sure I can make it up this." So up I went. It was steeper than it looked, with slushy snow and mud. I found myself slipping a couple of times and thought how silly it would be if I slid down and somehow got hurt and had to call 911 to be rescued.

When I got to what I thought would be a flatter area of the bluff, a place where perhaps I could get my bearings or even see how to make it over to the regular trail, I found that instead I was on a very narrow ledge. Now there was only 1 set of footprints. Everyone but me and this one other person had been smart enough to turn back. I stood there frozen for a moment, trying to decide whether I should take my chances on sliding back down the part of the bluff I had just climbed, or take my chances on a ledge perhaps 3 feet wide (more narrow in some places) curving around the side of the bluff. I looked ahead at the footprints ... they seemed to make it okay and I couldn't see any obvious signs of slippage. So I went ahead. I found myself inching along from tree branch (or bush clump) to tree branch (or bush clump). It was terrifying. I seriously thought I might meet a bad end, and then also I was panicking about whether I'd come out somewhere where I could find my way back to the trailhead and the meadow and my car.

I made it across the ledge and kept following that one set of footprints. I hoped they knew what they were doing, because I sure as hell didn't. And finally, after about 15 more minutes, I found myself at the edge of the meadow. I was on the opposite side of meadow from the trailhead, but I could find my way to the parking lot from there.

And the moral of the story is that when one ventures into the woods, one needs to stick to the trail.